Editor’s LetterWelcome to the second biannual edition of 8. We have taken Resistance as our theme, not least because we’ve been wondering if it’s still possible, or whether it has become a redundant, even futile, concept. For the FARC, of course, in Colombia, resistance is a way of life, and has been so for over 40 years. Spanish photographer Alvaro Ybarra Zavala has been on patrol with them, attesting to the casualties – on all sides – and the cocaine manufacture that characterise their pursuit of a communist state.

A few residents in the small village of Peacehaven on Britain’s south coast, meanwhile, are engaged in the ultimate act of resistance: against mortality itself. They have put their faith – and money – into the fledgling science of cryonics, in which devotees have their bodies frozen after death with the intention of reanimation, as Murray Ballard discovered. In the US, Seba Kurtis has been using his camera as resistance, celebrating the chaotic exuberance of “illegal” Hispanic residents in the land of the free by purposefully double-exposing his film, and letting light fall onto his negatives.One route to resistance is through knowledge, and this is the path taken by Simon Norfolk, with his latest project Full Spectrum Dominance. While most of us may never be in a position to challenge US military might, and its aim to utilise space in the battle to win the information war, at least through engagement with Norfolk’s graceful photographs and stark, densely-researched captions, we can better understand the reach of its power. We could even start a collective act of resistance by displaying the free Full Spectrum Dominance poster in our windows…

Elsewhere in the magazine, sports writer Paul Hayward reflects on the hypnotic spectacle that was the Beijing Olympics and academic and journalist Susan Greenberg enters unchartered territory, writing about personal experience for the first time, as she tries to resist breast cancer through chemotherapy.

Thanks for reading and keep in touch through the website until our next edition in Spring 2009.